A matte painting is a form of artwork that is added to live-action footage to enable filmmakers to create the illusion of environments that would otherwise be too expensive or impossible to build or visit. Such paintings were used for planetary scenes in many Star Trekfilms and television series. Even though the nomenclature suggests art, as production asset, a matte painting is currently understood to be a visual effects (VFX) element and as such is created under the auspices of the production's respective VFX companies, instead of that of the studio's art department. Traditionally done on glass or other transparent materials for lighting purposes, the traditional methods of creating matte paintings are currently all but replaced by the technique of computer generated imagery.

For Star Trek IV, a matte painting backdrop was created for Starfleet Command, combined with live-action footage of extras and shuttlecraft models. Stock footage of this sequence was reused in TNG: "Conspiracy". (citation needed • edit) For footage of a wild storm in the film, the effects artists intentionally avoided using matte paintings. "The biggest difficulty [with creating the storm footage] was doing it without going for tons of miniatures and matte paintings," recalled Optical Supervisor Ralph Gordon. (The Making of the Trek Films, 3rd ed., p. 72)

For the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Matte World was assigned to create three matte paintings. These did not include an establishing shot of Starfleet Headquarters that appears early in the film. Associate producer Brooke Breton explained, "This shot was added so very late in the schedule that we didn't even have the time to do a matte painting [for it] [...] since the matte department here was busy on Hook." The shot was instead created via the less time-consuming method of combining miniature elements with a live-action plate, the latter of which featured the Golden Gate Bridge. (Cinefex, No. 49, pp. 41 46, 48) The three settings for which Matte World did work were:

For the opening shot of Star Trek: First Contact, Syd Dutton and Bill Taylor of Illusion Arts provided matte painting enhancement, creating several Borg interior illustrations. (The Making of Star Trek: First Contact, pp. 121-122) Another matte painting – an enlarged, super-detailed one – was prepared to matte into the film's spacewalk sequence, though it was deemed unnecessary as the Sovereign-class model was sufficiently detailed as to be used instead. (The Making of Star Trek: First Contact, p. 116) Matte World also did some matte painting work for the Vulcan landing sequence in First Contact, using miniature trees. This work included the last shot of the movie, for which Vision Arts provided the Vulcan ship, the T'Plana-Hath. [3]

For the Star Trek: Voyager pilot episode "Caretaker", Illusion Arts created a matte painting of the underground Ocampa city. [X]wbm The surface of Ocampa was also shown using a matte painting, after Dan Curry created numerous different electronic sketches of matte painting elements. (The Art of Star Trek, pp. 134-135)

One unusual use of a matte painting is featured in the main title sequence of Voyager, representing an icy moon that the starship Voyager flies over. John Grower, the founder of Santa Barbara Studios, stated, "This foreground moon was actually a matte painting done by Craig Mullins, but then we took the matte painting and mapped it onto three-dimensional geometry, so it became a 3-D matte painting. We painted what's called a height-map that's a black-and-white map in which the bright parts extend closer toward you, and the dark parts get pushed back. You're essentially painting and creating three-dimensional geometry by playing with the contrast between white and black. You place the painting onto this geometry, and now you have a three-dimensional surface that you can rotate. You can have perspective happen within the painting." (Star Trek Monthly issue 10, p. 15)